The conference will examine the nature, origins, and consequences of America as a national security state since the end of World War II, including such programs as regime-change operations, invasions, occupations, coups, support of dictatorships, assassination, torture, indefinite detention, rendition, and kidnappings.

The conference will also focus on President John F. Kennedy’s turn toward peace and friendly relations with the Soviet Union, and Cuba and his resulting war against the U.S. national-security establishment.

We have lined up one of the most impressive arrays of speakers in our 27-year history for this conference. Complete bios are posted below.

Jeffrey Sachs, one of the speakers who takes no position on the Kennedy assassination, will kick off the conference with a discussion of JFK’s Peace Speech at American University in June 1963.

Stephen Kinzer and Michael Glennon, both of whom also take no position on the assassination, will be addressing the origins, nature, and consequences of the national security state.

Douglas Horne, David Talbot, Peter Janney, Jefferson Morley, and Jacob Hornberger, all of whom are authors of notable books relating to the JFK assassination — will be addressing the JFK presidency, his war with the national-security state, his outreach in peace and friendship to the Soviet Union, and the Cold War context of the JFK assassination.

Ron Paul will be talking about freedom and the national-security state and will be expressing his views on the JFK assassination at the conference.

Oliver Stone will be talking about the national-security state and the JFK assassination.

We hope you will join us for what promises to be a fantastic conference. Space will be limited and so attendance will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

Oliver Stone, the noted Hollywood producer and director, received an Academy Award for Best Director for his war drama Platoon, which received the Best Picture award. Stone won another Best Director Oscar for the second movie of his Vietnam War trilogy, Born on the Fourth of July, which was followed by Heaven & Earth. His other movies include Salvador, Wall Street, Natural Born Killers, Money Never Sleeps, The Doors, Nixon, W., and Snowden. He wrote the screenplay for Midnight Express, a movie that received three Academy Awards. He has also produced and directed many documentaries, including Showtime’s Untold History of the United States. In 1991, he directed the movie JFK, starring Kevin Costner and Donald Sutherland, which posits that the U.S. national-security establishment orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The movie led to the passage of the JFK Records Act, which mandated the disclosure and release of tens of thousands of assassination-related records and documents of the military, the CIA, the Secret Service, and other federal agencies.

Ron Paul was a Republican presidential candidate in 2008 and 2012 and the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1988. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1976-1977, from 1979-1985, and from 1997-2013. One of the country’s most ardent defenders of freedom, peace, free markets, and sound money, Paul has long been a fierce critic of the Federal Reserve System, the IRS, the war on drugs, socialism, empire, interventionism, and the national-security establishment. He has also been an ardent defender of civil liberties and a vocal critic of the USA PATRIOT Act, torture, indefinite detention, and NSA surveillance programs. A graduate of Gettysburg College and Duke University School of Medicine, Paul was a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist from the 1960s-1980s. The Founder of the Ron Paul Institute, Paul is the author of several books on Austrian economics and classical liberalism, among which are The Case for Gold, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, End the Fed, Pillars of Prosperity, The Revolution: A Manifesto, Swords into Plowshares, and Liberty Defined.

Jeffrey Sachs holds the title of University Professor, the highest rank of professorship at Columbia University. He is a special adviser to former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on the Millennium Development Goals. Sachs has authored three New York Times bestsellers: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011). His most recent book is The Age of Sustainable Development (2015). At the age of 28, he became a full professor with tenure at Harvard. Sachs was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2004 and 2005. In 2013, he authored a book on President John F. Kennedy’s remarkable Peace Speech at American University, entitled To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace.

Michael J. Glennon is Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He has been Legal Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1977-1980); a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC (2001-2002); and Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Scholar at the United States Military Academy, West Point (2005). Professor Glennon has served as a consultant to various congressional committees, the U.S. State Department, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Glennon is the author of numerous articles on constitutional and international law as well as several books. His op-ed pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, International Herald-Tribune, Financial Times, and Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung. The paperback edition of his latest book, National Security and Double Government, was published this year by Oxford University Press. He is the author of “Security Breach” in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Michael Swanson is the founder and editor of the financial website WallStreetWindow.com where he writes about the financial markets. Before founding that site he co-managed a hedge fund from 2003-2006. Swanson has a Master’s Degree in American history from the University of Virginia and has written works of 20th century American history including Danville, Virginia and the Coming of the Modern South (2010) and The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite (2013). He is currently working on a book covering the beginning of the US involvement in the Vietnam war from 1945-1963.

Peter Janney has been a practicing psychologist, educator, and consultant for over 35 years. He is the author of Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (3rd edition, 2016), which details his many years of investigation into Washington’s most famous unsolved murder of Mary Meyer. The book was the general non-fiction winner of the 2012 Hollywood Book Festival and received honorable mentions in the 2012 N.E. Book Festival and the 2012 London Book Festival. Hollywood producer and director Oliver Stone, who directed the movie JFK, called the book “a fascinating story” and said that “Peter Janney’s unsparing analysis moves us closer to a reckoning.” A graduate of Princeton, where he studied American history under Martin Duberman, Janney earned a doctoral degree in psychology at Boston University in 1981. He currently resides by the sea in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Jefferson Morley is moderator of of JFK Facts (JFKFacts.org). He worked as an editor and reporter at The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, and Harper’s Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, and Slate. His first book was Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (2008). His book Snow-Storm in August (2013) details what happened when the anti-slavery movement first came to Washington, D.C., during Andrew Jackson’s presidency. Morley is also the author of FFF’s ebook CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files. His newest book, a biography of James Jesus Angleton, CIA chief of CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, will be published by St. Martin’s Press this year.

Jim DiEugenio is the author and editor of three books on the assassinations of the sixties. They are the second edition of Destiny Betrayed (2012) , Reclaiming Parkland (2016), and The Assassinations (2003). For seven years, from 1993-2000, Jim was also the co-editor of what many considered the finest journal on the subject, Probe Magazine. From 2003-2016 he edited the web site, Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination. Today, he is the editor and publisher of the web site Kennedysandking.com.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, a libertarian educational foundation whose mission is to present an uncompromising case for the libertarian philosophy. He received a B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and a J.D. from the University of Texas. From 1975-1987 he was a trial attorney in Texas and also served as an adjunct professor of law and economics at the University of Dallas. Hornberger left the practice of law in 1987 to become director of programs at The Foundation for Economic Education and then founded FFF in 1989. He is the author of The Kennedy Autopsy as well as Regime Change: The Kennedy Assassination; and The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State.